A policy stocktake: tech scale-ups

23 Jun 2025 11:05 AM

Last week, London Tech Week and the Spending Review brought much energy to the tech sector (it's said that over 30,000 people set foot in Olympia alone!). But as we await the UK government’s 'full' growth offer – including the delivery of the modern industrial strategy - time to take stock on recent policy announcements relevant for scale-ups.

So, where do we stand, and what's been announced?

The UK remains an exciting place to innovate and build a tech business and is still the leading European nation for tech investment. Tech Nation’s annual report, released last week, revealed that the UK tech sector has now reached $1.2 trillion valuation. NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang also recognised this and pledged support for the UK's booming AI start up ecosystem with a £1.5bn investment. 

Not only this, in a move to try improve her relationship with high-growth companies, the Chancellor has appointed Alex Depledge, a champion of female start-ups, as the UK Treasury's first entrepreneurship advisor. This marks a step in the right direction to improve the funding sources for female entrepreneurs.

We’ve seen a breadth of announcements over recent weeks:

Specifically during London Tech Week, we saw:

In the Spending Review, we saw:

The government’s Spending Review doesn't just allocate funds - it sets direction. This is done through budgets for individual departments spending for the next three years. Important to note that the government will also review the Spending Review in 2027, and departments will now be working through business cases for funding. 

To read the full list of announcements in the Spending Review, see our article ‘Spending Review: what’s in it for tech?’.

A few announcements that stood out for tech scale-ups include:

Now, for the government's full growth offer:

Just over a year ago, I wrote about the steps needed for the UK to build the next tech giant. Many of these asks still stand. Ultimately, high-growth businesses will be the engines of growth in high-growth sectors and should be at the core of the UK government’s economic and industrial strategy, and full growth offer.

Sage’s research showed that UK scale-ups reported average annual revenue increase of 43% over the past three years - more than double the OECD benchmark. Despite representing less than 0.6% of the SME population, scale-ups account for over 55% of UK SME output at £1.45 trillion.

Take some of our recent success stories – where an entrepreneurial mindset married with an innovative idea and investment to successfully scale a pioneering idea and bring this to market. techUK member Quantexa secured historic Series F funding to advance AI-driven decision intelligence. They are making an impact across government agencies to prevent fraud and modernise services using analytics and AI. Multiverse, the first ever EdTech unicorn recieved record-breaking funding and continue to support the development of AI-enabled workforces through upskilling and reskilling.

We consistently hear that tech founders have a strong basis to start from and begin the initial growth stages of their business. But success musn’t breed complacency and challenges remain; including high energy costs, difficulty securing the right talent and a level playing field for procurement.

In the upcoming Tech Sector Plan, the government has an opportunity to focus on 'scale' and supporting this across emerging technologies. These don’t have to be high-cost measures but a signal of commitment and intent to support, and recognise, the role that high-growth businesses play.

You can view techUK’s key recommendations for scale-ups via our Scale-Up Action Plan report. A few suggestions include: